Wild at Heart.

LOVE, the saying goes, conquers all. But not, I must insist, stupidity, as David Lynch's new film, Wild at Heart, amply demonstrates. And I don't mean just the stupidity of its main characters, Lula and Sailor, two near-imbecile juveniles who want nothing from life but continuous sprees and incontinent sex. I mean especially the stupidity of their creator, David Lynch [see Weird America," p. 381. For that is the overarching characteristic of his oeuvre, from Eraserhead through The Elephant Man, Dune, and Blue Velvet, to the current Wild at Heart. I can't speak about Twin Peaks, because the one thing I will not stoop to is TV soaps, regardless of how titillatingly unwashed. But I assume that television's self-censorship is powerfully craven enough to sanitize even the most unleashed minds.

Wild at Heart is a cul-de-sac of a road movie in which nothing leads anywhere or makes the barest minimum of sense. Sailor, a shiftless youth with an Elvis complex and prison record, and Lula, a benighted girl with a Marilyn fixation and a demented mother, set out on a wild drive from the Carolinas to California, pursued by the crazily jealous and vengeful mother's bravos (killers, not kudos) and beset by assorted mauvaises rencontres. They hit New Orleans, and get as far as Big Tuna, Texas, singing, dancing, fornicating, and exchanging loopy banalities all the way. (Sample: "I'm sorry, Sailor, but the ozone layer is disappearing.") In Tuna, Sailor gets involved in a robbery, is jailed again, but, after serving five years, ten months, and 21 days (the script is maniacally specific about prison terms), rejoins his woman and hitherto unseen son, and, after a brief contretemps, the three of them are off and running again.

This may sound harmless enough, but Lynch throws in every kind of imbecility, perversity, and disgustingness (most of them gratuitous) he can think of, with only the X rating the limit. If he were a less successful filmmaker-this garbage walked, or drove, off with the Golden Palm at Cannes-the movie might indeed have earned an X; as it is, something had to be snipped after Cannes. Why does Lynch win over juries and critics (audiences, alas, are beyond explication and help)? There is a clue in Lula's exclamation in a moment of postcoital pensiveness, "This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top." The typical movie reviewer is weaned on top but child (or infant) at heart.

Characteristic of the film is an incident at the Texas motel. Sailor is away on some fishy Tuna business while Lula, as is her wont, lolls around in bed awaiting their next sexual bout. Only lately she's been feeling queasy (it turns out she's pregnant) and when Sailor, returning, asks why it 'smells so terrible," she calmly informs him she's thrown up on the rug. Neither of them makes the slightest move to clean up the mess, not even when, for some time to come, every visitor comments on the stench.

To dot the i and turn the stomach, we are accorded a closeup of the vomit on the carpet, with cockroaches lushly swarming over it. What makes this extreme closeup especially memorable is that Frederick Elmes, Lynch's favorite cinematographer, has a low-angle shot that actually manages to shoot up at the cockroaches; it is not every cameraman and director that can stoop lower than a cockroach. As David Edelstein remarked in the New York Post, "That shot-and the fact that no one cleans [the puke] up, and that people remark for the next half-hour on how the room reeks-captures something of the Wild at Heart aroma. The images are so overripe, so lushly fetid, that you can almost smell the barf in every shot."

There is no need to review in detail this film that proffers a busted skull with the brain oozing out; a head (another one) blown off with part of it landing near the camera; a set of wired, brown, apocopated teeth on a smiling villain; a car-wreck victim spouting blood in a tight shot; a fellow getting his kicks out of cramming cockroaches into his underwear; Marietta, Lula's mother, smearing her entire face with lipstick till her head becomes a Halloween pumpkin-or, rather, tomato; as well as the odd form of sexual deviation, but kept carefully soft-core. If this stuff were integrated into some sort of schema; if it shed any sort of light, however lurid; if it created at least some plausible atmosphere, very well; but no, Lynch will have no truck with credibility, and uses Barry Gifford's trashy underlying novel only as an excuse for his own aberrations. - Though it may also be sick, Lynch's oeuvre is, above all, stupid. Thus in The Elephant Man, Lynch showed us -the horribly misshapen hero's face, which the play (on which the film claimed not to be based) had the sense to spare us; a disfigurement, by the way, he quite unscientifically turned into a Dumbo head out of some demented version of Disney. Thus Dune was a film that could not be followed from one moment to the next. Thus Blue Velvet, though likewise utter nonsense, managed, because of its seeming novelty and a semblance of control, to garner almost unanimous raves.

In interviews, Lynch is always mild-mannered, self-effacing, platitudinous, and thoroughly boring. Are his movies, then, the forbidden fantasies of a psychotic Walter Mitty? Or are the interviews the canny dissemblings of a genuine sociopath? There may be a conundrum here, but the movies are too mindless to justify analyzing the mind behind them. "The way your head works is God's private mystery," says one character about another in Wild at Heart; it could be any one of them talking about any other. What is worth analyzing is the critical mind, which, though largely unimpressed by Lynch's latest, was almost without exception taken in by Blue Velvet.

The answer, I reiterate, is infantilism. Film critics-and I cannot in good conscience exempt myself, although I adduce as an extenuating circumstance that I also review most of the other arts-are childish. They spend their time on an art form (and, unlike some highbrows, I insist that it is one) that has lapsed far too early into its second childhood and, at least in America, seems to produce nothing but infantile violence, infantile sex, or infantile humor. To which, latterly, may be added infantile metaphysics: movies about persons who die and come back as ghosts to protect their loved ones or pleasurably scarify the audience, either way indulging folks for whom even this life may be more than they deserve with promises of an afterlife of which they are certifiably unworthy.

What makes Lynch's film incrementally inane is his casting of the three main characters: Sailor, Lula, and Marietta, her unhinged mother. Sailor is played by Nicholas Cage, an aggressively untalented and unprepossessing actor who owes his entry into films to being Francis Ford Coppola's nephew, and his persistence in them to the public's love of bestiality. Cage's acting, regardless of the role, is alternate moping and rant. The former accords with his slack-jawed, hangdog face; the latter, with his cracked-voiced, brutish speech. That audiences and reviewers find this appealing is surely one of God's private jokes, if not mysteries.

Even more admiration has been generated by Laura Dern of the beanpole body and totem-pole face. She, in turn, owes her presence in pictures to being the daughter of Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd-neither parent much to look at, and the daughter heir to the drawbacks of both. Papa, at any rate, is a good actor, but Laura is totally inept, as she conclusively proved in her brief venture onto the New York stage. She has had the good fortune to be cast in films as a dupe or a dummy, roles that were better served by her ephebic sexlessness than is the combustible Lula. Watching her and Cage repeatedly go at each other reminded me once again of how hard it is to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together.

The increasing tendency in movies (and elsewhere) to wallow in unsightliness reaches one of its apogees in Diane Ladd as Marietta: Laura Dern's real-life mother playing her on-screen one. Marietta is mad, but must she also be mannish, coarse-featured, and a ham? Much of the movie seems to